ELDER PATRIOT - Last night CNN’s Anderson Cooper featured a panel discussion over Donald Trump’s charges that the nominating process is rigged. Apparently his “experts” are free to say whatever supports their position even if there’s no truth to their claims.
One guest chided Trump that if he didn’t like the nominating system of the Republicans he should blame the Founding Fathers who put it in place.
The Founders were dead set against the formation of political parties and especially fearful of a two-party system. They wrote extensively on this subject.
On top of that the political parties make their own rules as they go along as we’re finding out only because Donald Trump had the temerity to challenge their control over the electorate.
Then there’s the fact that the Republican Party came into existence in 1854, seventy-three years after the Constitution was written. There wasn’t a single surviving Founder by that time.
Finally, the rule to deny Coloradans any say in the nominating process by eliminating their right to vote was passed by party insiders in October of 2015.
No one on the panel challenged her assertion and Cooper said nothing to correct the record.
These are the same people who shout from the rooftops that Blacks are being disenfranchised when they have to show an ID to vote.
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Political pundits, with what can only be explained if they have a vested interest in preventing Donald Trump from winning the Republican nomination, took to the political talk shows last week with the claim that Trump has benefitted from the party’s rules because they allowed him to win a disproportionately high number of delegates in winner-take-all states. . That’s the same system our Founding Fathers put in place when they established the Electoral College but that deter them.
They were laying the foundation for a convoluted argument to disallow Trump’s delegates from being credentialed at the convention.
The problem with their argument is that if they want to turn the process over to a direct vote of the people Trump has two million votes more than his nearest competitor.
Side note: Trying to install John Kasich as a compromise candidate at the convention is equally flawed. Kasich still trails Marco Rubio in the popular vote despite Rubio having dropped out over a month ago. Without the support of his home state of Ohio, Kasich’s has attracted less than 10% of the votes cast elsewhere.
Along those same lines, if Cruz’s vote total in his home state isn’t counted he falls three million votes behind Trump, garnering only 23% from the rest of America.
Trump gets to play on his home turf this Tuesday.
But, of course, it’s all about the delegates. Nothing rigged about that.